All Change

Here in learning support we are all looking forward to the holidays but for us its a time of change.
The captain of our little ship is about to retire after 18 years of service at JFK as this is posted we are not sure who will be steering our ship into the summer term.
We all wish her a happy retirement and are looking forward to postcards from around the world as she travels of into the sunset or rise depend on the direction she is flying of too.

HAPPY RETIREMENT MRS C

Starting the Teaching and Learning Workshops

30th September 2009
I've been asked by PN to revive the Teaching and Learning blog, which is one of the reasons why I am making this post. I'll be sending a reminder about the blog around to all members of the T & L Workshop, to ask people to post any information. If you want to become a member e-mail me on my work e-mail account, and I'll add you.

In addition, I'm going to 'blog' what has happened at each workshop. Members are invited to add their own contributions, comments, suggestions, etc.

We had our first proper meeting this evening as the first one earlier this month was an introduction. PN asked us to think about things that we were looking forward to this year, at which point virtually everyone went quiet, and looked at the floor. It's not that I don't like my job - I actually think it's great - but sometimes when you are in the thick of it it can be hard to really appreciate why we are doing it. Largely I enjoy it on a day-to-day basis when you actually have a great lesson, or a kid thanks you, or comes along in the lunchtime to finish something off. I don't actually look forward to marking a huge great pile of coursework in the spring - although I suppose I do enjoy supporting the students through their work.

Fiona said that she is looking forward to having taught the whole of the A level syllabus, so that she really feels confident with it - which I can relate to, then Gwyn talked about a new initiative with a school in Spain. Christian said he was looking forward to getting all the GCSE coursework completed, but Richard then went and talked about the trip to China - which made us all green with envy.

PN asked us to fill in a questionnaire about assessment strategies we use, which once again made me feel a bit unhappy, as it challenged me to think about how I am assessing learning, and whether the ways that I am doing it are actually as good as they could be. I'm confident about some of the ways, but am I being as effective as I can be? We discussed other ways of assessing learning, and Marie mentioned the idea of getting students to text a quick summary of what they had learned in a lesson. This is BRILLIANT, but I'm going to get my A level students to TWITTER their summaries instead - this will give them just 140 letters, and I can do it all on-line.

We decided on our rules for the TLC, many we consider as givens, however, our key points are:

• to improve student learning by using AfL strategies
• be open to learning new things and be willing to give up old habits that might not be as effective as we like
• use descriptions to discuss student and teacher work, avoiding judgement
• be honest about where we are 'shining' and where we are having difficulties (ie. its always important to share the good things)
• appreciate that different approaches work for different teachers and don't expect everyone to do the same as you.

We worked on Personal Action Plans to think about what we are focusing before the next meeting. We have to give a copy of this to PN, so that we can discuss it next time.

I am going to work on Twitter with the A level students to reinforce learning as well as being another way of assessing understanding. I did think that I'd do some work on providing sample work of different grades, but Christian said that he is going to work on praising students. As he was talking about it this just seemed so important that I have decided to do this too. I do recognise that there are going to be some problems - like managing to praise a student who is just behaving badly - but I'm going to give it a go, especially in KS3. I thought for a long time that students know how good their work is comparatively, and if you praise some really poor work, then they will think that you are being patronising, but actually, I don't think that they do know that the work is poor. I think that a lot of them have considerable difficulty in seeing how good their work is compared to some standard.

I've now got to arrange for Ian P to come along and watch me praising a class.

Postponed move

Unfortunately we have not been able to move in as we hoped to after the Easter break, the contents of the office is packed and waiting for us in the new block. This may have a knock on effect if you require any information from us concerning any students. We will of course do our best to answer any queries and give you the information requested. Sarah Sanders PA to Mrs Clapworthy is now to be found on extension 244 in B13.

Learning Support is on the move-
We will situated in the new D block on the ground floor. Nicely sandwiched between Music and the learning recourse center. In rooms D 14 to 20 normal service will resume during the fazed in move if you have trouble finding us during the move we apologies for the inconvenience

T&L Group December Meeting

Thanks to all for coming to the meeting this week - welcome to Christian, representing the Technology Department. I'm sure we all appreciated the work Jackie had done to facilitate our introduction to the VLE.
I have AfL audits from Art, Geography, MFL and RE - can I please have the others ASAP.

Next meeting: Wednesday 14th January 4 p.m.:

• your opportunity to share anything you've done with the VLE
• Rachel, Phil and myself to report back on recent INSET attended

Happy Christmas! Enjoy the break.

Paul

blog member from Learning support

Hello I am the contact for LS department if you have anything you wish to know about please leave a message in comments

I have arrived - at last!!

Hi All

I am a new user and am here to help as best I can with any technical or non-technical questions.

And unfortunately there is nothing I can do about the weight of the new laptops, I apologise for those of you that have inherted a brick!!

Educational Websites and Blogs

It occurred to me that it might be worth putting some links to educational or interesting websites and blogs. I have added these beneath the Blog Archive.

Let me know if you know of a website or blog that is a useful or is a good example of use in education, or which might be of interest or help to other members of staff - and I'll add it.

Adding labels to posts

I've added 'labels' to some of the posts so far. This will make it easier for people to search the blog for something. They are easy to add, just put them in at the bottom of the Post.

Put in a keyword, if something similar is already in there then you will get a list to choose from.

Posting Word and PowerPoint to Blogger

The simple answer is that Blogger has disabled a simple upload of the documents to your blog. It is very easy to upload pictures (jpg, gif, bmp and png), but Word and PowerPoint are a little harder. I believe that this is because of security issues. Office documents can have program code embedded in them, which can be used to make malicious attacks on the servers hosting Blogger.

However, it is possible to upload your documents to the Internet, using Google Docs, which you can then link to from your blog. As a member of Blogger you already have a Google account which you need for Google Docs.

I had never done this before, so I've done it now, and uploaded a document to tell you how to do it:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=drd54bk_34fw4xsrcs

This has been set up so that anyone may view it. It is not limited to members of this blog.

I hope this is of help, if you need more information, or the presentation itself isn't completely clear, please get back to me.
CJF

Hello everyone!
Cath, I've had a go at setting up an RE teachers' blog for Herts. But is it possible to add powerpoints or word documents to a blog? If it is, can you tell me how?

new user

Hi, just to all of you out there I am a new member.

Anything you think I need to know tell me please!!

Correction!

The next meeting of the T&L group is Wednesday 10th December!

One giant leap for PN!

Thanks to all who attended last night's T&L group meeting.
What happened?
RC gave us a demo of the Geography blog and provided help with regard to starting blogging
CF showed us her ICT blog and has set up this T&L blog
PN referred to the AfL audit, reminding everyone of the task in hand - to complete this audit for your own subject area - this is now available electronically in the T&L folder on the Staff Shared Area
Next meeting: Wednesday 12th December 4 p.m.
Agenda:
V.L.E.
Gathering together the AfL audit

Blogging for teaching and learning

We had another meeting of the Assessment for Learning group this afternoon. We looked at the use of the Geography blog with years 12 and 13, for the dissemination of information to students, as well as the assessments of their comments to gauge understanding. This is a closed blog, visible only to members, so we cannot post a link.

In ICT we are experimenting with the use of a blog with 2 top set year 9 groups. The students have only been doing this for a few weeks, and only have one hour a week ICT, however, at the moment the results are very promising. The purpose was to get the students to use a variety of different means of electronic communication, view a wide range of samples of each others' work, and to make constructive comments on each others' work to help sharpen their critical facilities for their own work. In general the students find it very difficult to assess and suggest improvements for their own work, however; by reviewing the work of others they get practice at the skills. Future plans include: use of the on-line site SlideShare to share their presentations and setting targets for themselves for this year.

To emphasise the importance of on-line safety students have not been allowed to use personal names, photos of themselves or include any personal information in their profiles.

You can see their progress here.

Wordle - 'Word Clouds'

I really like Wordle - although in my subject its uses are largely limited to producing keyword posters. I'm sure that it could have a wide range of uses in many subjects. You can change the font, and the colour scheme, as well as the basic layout (every which way, horizontal, mostly horizontal, half and half, mostly vertical, all vertical). The more often you enter a word, the larger the word is in the Wordle. TIP - put your text into a wordprocessor and paste it into the web-site 'create' window, in case you need to go back and re-do it - as it is lost when you press the 'create' button.

Wordle produces 'word clouds'. It's online at http://wordle.net/, and at the moment there are some unresolved problems with using it on the school network, so you can't use it with your students in lessons until these have been sorted, but you should be able to use it at home. Here are some examples, some are produced by me, others have been taken from the web-site (click on any of these to display them full screen):

Word Processor - keywords poster












Dylan Thomas











Colour Keywords - I searched for as many colour names as I could










Beatles - All you need is love












The Sermon on the mount

Content Generator - more (free) software

I love this stuff - it's great fun, and really good for a quiz. I use it with my A level students to reinforce definitions - I just wish they wouldn't customise the teacher to look quite so much like me though!

Or - you can get your students to think up the questions and answers. We've done this in ICT with A level students to help reinforce definitions and understanding.

There are several content generator programs - most of them are a 'paid for' option, but "Fling the Teacher", "Teacher Invaders", and "Match Up Generator" are free downloads. The network managers have kindly put them onto the network, and they are available in the staff workroom. (NOTE: now in B29 and A18 too)

Fling the teacher - this allows you to enter 15 or more multiple choice questions (four choices). There is a Flash animation of a teacher in a mortarboard, which the students can customise for hair style, colour, etc. As they correctly answer the questions a trebuchet is constructed, and when they get all 15 correctly in a row the teacher is flung from the trebuchet, complete with a countdown ("you know enough to throw your teacher away"). Like "Who wants to be a millionaire", there are three lifelines - 50:50; what were previous answers to the question; and 'ask an expert'. If they get an answer wrong it's back to the beginning. You must enter 15 questions, but if you put in more than that then the students get a selection of 15, so the more you put in the greater the degree of randomisation between students.












Teacher Invaders - like space invaders, but blatting teachers instead of aliens - a question every 20 seconds to get more time.

Match Up Generator - matching 6 different paired items - with a time limit if you want.

A text file is produced, and then your Flash file is generated from this - you don't need the generator program on the computer you are playing it on as it is saved as a Flash file which plays in Internet Explorer.

Formulator Tarsia - some useful (free) software

Formulator Tarsia is a free download - it is designed for Maths, but can be adapted for many subjects. It allows you to quickly produce a variety of different 'jigsaws', which can be used as starters, or to reinforce definitions, etc. You can even upload small graphics files. The network managers have kindly put it onto the school network - it is currently available on the computers in the staff workroom and B29, or you can download it yourself at home.

This is what a completed 'solution' to a jigsaw looks like:
















These are the options available:













The variety allows you to adapt to the ability of the group - for really weak students you can give them the middle six of a hexagon.

I photocopy the output onto card, which I then cut into the triangles, squares, etc, and keep in a (labelled) envelope.

Teaching and Learning - the Meeting

We had a really interesting meeting, discussing teaching and learning after school today. PN was full of enthusiasm, and had loads of ideas. There were lots of other members of staff from a wide range of departments, with some really good ideas for starters.

I personally think that ICT is going to be increasingly important in education, and that we must equip ourselves with the skills that will allow us to support our students in this changing world - but then I would do, wouldn't I.

I decided to set up this blog so that staff can share experiences, ideas and materials - and, just as importantly, practice blogging skills.

This blog should be for all staff at JFK to share any information about teaching and learning. It is for ALL teaching and learning ideas - not just ICT.

If you would like to be able to post or comment on this blog send me an e-mail - we can have up to 100 authors.